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Reopening and extension of the Biennale exhibitions
from May 12 to June 28, 2020
BIENNALE FÜR AKTUELLE FOTOGRAFIE 2020
THE LIVES AND LOVES OF IMAGES
29.2. - 26.4.2020
EXHIBITION AT MUSEUM WELTKULTUREN:
RECONSIDERING ICONS
Photography has come to symbolize the extremes of contemporary society. It is deeply personal and yet thoroughly public. Freeing at times yet also limiting. Expressive yet culturally dominant. Pleasurable, but worrying. There is affection for photography, but we are or ought to be suspicious of its power and manipulations. If we are dependent upon the photographic image, as so many have claimed over the last century, this dependence gives us mixed feelings.
Jojakim Cortis & Adrian Sonderegger, Making of 'The Fallen Soldier' (by Robert Capa, 1936) 2016
EXHIBITION AT MUSEUM WELTKULTUREN:
RECONSIDERING ICONS
We are all acutely aware of the phenomenon of the iconic image. Newspapers and news websites regularly describe photographs as ‘iconic’. And if a photograph does become well known, news outlets are quick to capitalize by running secondary stories about its fame, which only serves to extend the image’s reach and cultural domination. It is an echo chamber of the image, and a hall of mirrors.
Of the billions of images in the world, just a few have become iconic. The exhibition Reconsidering Icons contains no iconic images, and yet it is full of them. It draws together various projects from recent years that use strategies of remaking, revising and redefining. Some projects return to the site where iconic images were made. Some reconstruct them. Some track iconic images across their various media manifestations. Some use new technologies such as virtual reality and 3D modeling, to return us to images made in earlier epochs of photography.
Whatever the strategy, the iconic image is approached as a complex form of cultural commons to be looked at critically, philosophically and playfully. If iconic images belong to the public imagination, we must have an imaginative relation to them.
Artists:
Broomberg & Chanarin / David Claerbout / Cortis & Sonderegger / Joan Fontcuberta / Max Pinckers & Dries Depoorter / Max Pinckers & Sam Weerdmeester
Forum Internationale Photographie (FIP) & ZEPHYR – Raum für Fotografie in den Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen
Exhibition at Museum Weltkulturen
D5, 68159 Mannheim
More information: www.biennalefotografie.de
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